In this episode, we will be continuing our journey into the world of fine art as I talk to Jack Storms, one of the very few cold glass sculptors in the world. His work has been featured in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie and viral videos that have reached hundreds of millions of viewers. In this episode Jack will explain more about his work process, how his art piece ended up in a Marvel movie, meeting Stan Lee in person and his own advice for those who want to build a successful business as an artist.

Highlights

The techniques and process Jack Storms used to create the signature look for his glass sculptures

Why there aren’t many cold glass artists in the world

How Jack’s love for geometry influence the aesthetics for his art

Jack’s journey of becoming a sculptor and going from being inspired by Stan Lee in the early days to a memorable experience of meeting him in person

How a Jack Storms sculpture landed a part in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie

Jack’s plans for growing his brand and increasing engagement with his fans by sharing what it takes to be a functioning artist through his vlog and Patreon

Jack’s advice for aspiring artist entrepreneurs

Practical Tip

” Develop a thick skin, listen to criticism, even mean spirited criticism might hold a kernel of truth, and if you focus on that kernel of truth you can develop better art. Also treat it like a real business, a real career and don’t treat it like a hobby then expect to pay a mortgage with it because it won’t work.”

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” You need to be in the right place and know the right people that can help with materialising it, and a series of miracles to make it happen. ” Jaime Lau, Founder & Gallery Director, The Spectacle Group

In this episode, we go into the world of fine art business and will be talking to Jaime Lau, Founder & Gallery Director at The Spectacle Group about how she selects artists and art pieces for her gallery, working with emerging and established fine artists from different categories including glass and photography, and an exciting new documentary she’s working on.

Highlights

Criterias beyond visual aesthetics when selecting work for The Spectacle Group gallery

Innovation in processes and methodology for Fine Artists

How can an artist grow their fanbase – race to becoming not just the best artist but the most well known

Developing brand extension and collaborations so that her artists can reach art lovers outside of galleries and putting artists work on products that people can relate to and bring them to people who aren’t normally art lovers

Documentary pilot series she is currently working on with The Spectacle Group

Jaime’s advice for aspiring artists and content creators

Practical Tip

” The biggest challenge is that things don’t always go according to plan even if you plan far in advance. Just relax, leave things down to its own timing and with the right attitude you’ll always find a way to move forward. “

Links

For the latest exhibitions and more information on artists and art pieces mentioned on the show, please visit:

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” ‘Ego systems’ will get knocked over. It shouldn’t be your idea out there chasing the world. Make small calculated bets. Make decisions based on evidence rather than opinion. Help build cultures that are not opinion led but evidence led. Leaders should look at experiment results as data to make decisions on how to move forward.” – Kate Okrasinski, MAKE Studios

For those who are not from the creative industry – what is Service Design?

Service design is the design of services. It is to understand the customer experience and how every layer of the organisation contributes to customer experience.

How can businesses deliver meaningful and relevant experience that meet customer needs using a human centred approach?

Consider what the future needs to look like and the problems with the current system.

The process – where do you begin?

Start with assumption busting. Investigate and test organisation assumptions by asking: Is this what the market needs? Is it what the final users are saying?

Define the problem and test with a hypothesis. Collect feedback from customers on solution prototypes and iterate until you find product market fit.

Does data play a role in Service Design Innovation?

Clients are usually data driven, but both qualitative and quantitative data should be taken into consideration at different stages.

Qualitative data is much more important when it comes to planning for the future and surfacing potential directions for the future.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) drives culture. Work with KPIs down the track to make sure they’re representative of information that’s of value.

Unique challenges and opportunities of innovating in Hong Kong

Hong Kong may not be perceived as innovative as other places but it is in a unique position to create its own brand of innovation.

For MAKE Studios, English is the language of business whereas user research are generally run in Cantonese where it is more a language of innovation for connecting authentically with local people.

Chinese culture has dedication towards innovation. There is less need to be deliberate and get consensus in comparison to Europe and America, and more about the courage to act and make a difference within an organisation.

Designing for Impact

Design for Impact is a programme MAKE Studios launched to apply Design Thinking to social issues by partnering with NGO, corporates, other specialities to tackle hairy problems in society, and creating solutions and vision for ideal outcomes.

The programme is more about activation and demonstrating the power of the Design Thinking process in problem solving, while collaborating with others to achieve impact.

Behavioural economics is a powerful tool to understand what’s happening moment to moment, but there is a danger of leveraging it to drive stickiness and nudge behaviours in a purely superficial way.

MAKE’s goal is to implement deeper level service innovation that increases revenue and deliver transformative value for organisations in the long run.

Managing risks of innovation

MAKE Studios recommends de-risking innovation by front stacking the risks through user research and understanding to see if you have correctly interpreted the problem in the first place.

Prototype a series of experiments and take an incremental approach so that by the time you get to market with anything new and innovative, you already know that there is product market fit and have gained some traction in the market.

Risk comes from ego. If you believe you’re right, the innovation is only a business fallacy. It requires grit, dialogue with the customers, the market ecosystem and customer insight in order to remain relevant.

Overcoming the challenges of corporate innovation

Having a safe environment to fail when doing experiments is important. Innovation is fundamentally about human relationship. To build psychological safe environment for people to look at challenge and interrogate that challenge

Benefit of inclusion is that idea sits apart from any of us. You need diverse opinions for ideas to get better. You need the voice of customers in the room, decide what needs to be prototyped and get it out into the real world to see if it works. De-risk culture by research.

Practical Tips

A few practical tips from Kate and Patti for creative entrepreneurs looking to innovate within their business:

Patti

1) From Adam Lawrence’s book ‘This is Service Design doing’ If you do one thing – do customer research. If you can do two things – do customer research and prototyping.

2) Stop talking about ideas and speculate about what might/might not work, do the research and put your idea/prototype in front of customers to test

Kate

1) Ask better questions of yourself, your team, your ideas, the problem. Take the time to do the research to answer it.

2) De-risking innovation takes time and focused energy. Make sure you make the right choices

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Should our brand be podcasting? With the rapid rise of podcasts and exponential growth of podcast listeners and investment in podcast media and tech companies, this is a question that no doubt many brands have in mind when it comes to their marketing strategy.

In comparison to US, UK or even China, Hong Kong has been slow in its uptake of podcasts as a marketing medium for businesses. I was therefore excited to have Sam Book and Surmayee Tetarbe, the creators of Sassy Speaks, a podcast created by Sassy Media Group to celebrate their 10 years anniversary, to be my guest on the very first episode of The Innovate for Growth Podcast.

There are lots of valuable tips for those who are considering to start your own podcast and use it as part of your marketing/brand building strategy in this episode, as well as how to grow an audience for a new podcast.

Below are the show notes from this episode:

For large brands launching their own podcast series

Branded podcasts are being published by companies like Gimlet Creative in collaboration with well known brands including Tinder, Chase, Mastercard.

The general trend in marketing is to move away from display ads to content. There is a much greater focus on telling your brand story, selling a lifestyle that your product fits into and satisfying customer needs and wants.

Work with a company that can create the brand story for you or come up with your own, but do not make it a hard sell.

TTYL, an Instagram marketing podcast produced by Later, a social media scheduling platform is a good example of how branded podcasts can be used to keep consumers coming back because they add value in a relevant way for their product and make your target audience feel like a person rather than just another marketing statistic.

Podcasts generally have a high quality audience – conversion much higher than other marketing medium like billboards.

Planning your podcast launch and time investment required

“Have a realistic expectation of amount of time you will invest in it. For Sassy Speaks, we listen to it 4 or 5 times before each episode go out “

Set your goals for the podcast from the beginning and tick off the boxes as you go along

It took them 6 months to complete production of a 10 episodes season for Sassy Speaks

For each episode, the Sassy Speaks team spends:

An hour to prepare script

An hour recording

An hour setting up and dismantling

An hour for show notes

Creative director/designer creating artwork on a daily basis

Marketing your podcast

If you’re building personal brand, your podcast will become synonymous with your brand

Plan like hell and be ready and proactive in marketing it

What makes your podcast brand a success is a clear value proposition and knowing what that is from the start

Some Practical tips:

Make sure content align with data and what readers expect

Make sure everything is on brand, market it every week and that when people are listening to a new episode they know what to expect

Try to work with a company that’s done podcasting before if you are looking to create an original podcast for your brand

Put as few barriers as possible to your audience as possible when you’re looking to grow your audience

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I’ve been a fan of podcasts since discovering them a couple of years ago starting with Girl Boss Radio, The Tim Ferriss Show and Gimlet Media’s StartUp podcast and have been hooked since. For one thing, it means being able to get away from spending time in front of a screen and instead putting my phone aside to concentrate on listening to high quality in depth conversations on any topic you can think of.

Why we started the Innovate for Growth Podcast

It took awhile to gather the courage and skills required to start my own podcasting journey, but I haven’t looked back since. With The Innovate for Growth Podcast, my mission is to empower creative entrepreneurs like myself to be able to build successful businesses doing what they are passionate about, while being able to make a positive difference to the world at scale.

We have some amazing guests lined up for Season 1 from Hong Kong and around the world who are doing incredibly innovative work in their respective industries. Innovation becomes a whole new world of possibilities when you go beyond the tech industry and consider it in different contexts such as integration of service design innovation within businesses, material and methodologies for creating fine art, business models for character/children’s show IP, what it means to innovate with the whole education system and how brands leverage innovation to scale positive impact.

Here are some of the guests who will be appearing on Season 1 of The Innovate for Growth Podcast:

I hope you’ll enjoy The Innovate for Growth Podcast as much as we’ve done in creating it. And if you’d like to start your own podcast, WordPress makes it really simple.

What to do next:

Subscribe to The Innovate for Growth Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or any podcast player of your choice

Join our launch party on Thursday 29 August featuring a live interview and Tai Chi performance and workshop with Master Chow Chin Ching, Founder of Chen Style Tai Chi Institute

Become a fan and support the production of the Innovate for Growth Podcast! It takes a lot of work to put together, edit and promote each podcast, and we are doing this in our own spare time because we believe in empowering more creative entrepreneurs to build successful businesses while making a difference.

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